Neighborhood Mutual Aid Groups and Spaces of Deviant Care

In mid-March 2020, US residents witnessed mass-mobilization to ensure that vulnerable community members (including food-, housing-, and income-insecure individuals, as well as disabled, elderly, and immunocompromised individuals) had their immediate needs met in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the roll-out of stay-at-home orders. Many of these COVID19 neighborhood mutual aid groups were located in metropolitan areas experiencing simultaneous processes of gentrification, racial banishment, and displacement. The presence of these groups, especially those comprised mainly of white, young, gentrifiers challenged previously held notions of ‘care’. For some, this phenomenon raised the question of whether all care ensures survival. And for whom does care, as offered by mutual aid groups, ensure survival? The purpose of this thesis is to think through the role COVID-19 neighborhood mutual aid groups play in foreclosing or furthering Black survival. Building off the work of scholars of care and deviance (Joan Tronto, Dorothy Roberts, Ren Yo Hwang, and Cathy Cohen), this thesis contributes to both fields by inquiring about the places where deviant care is practiced. In this thesis, I propose a theory of deviant care geographies, which I define as “productions of space/place which resist Black subjection and Black death by emotionally, materially, and ontologically attending to the survival of ‘deviant’ persons.” Deviant care geographies require the centering of Black people, moves away from care as a tenuous institution or as a allocated according to merit, refuses liberal, individualist notions of society members worthy of care, and it creates new socio-spatial relations. Using this theory of spatialized care, I analyze six interviews from a Central Brooklyn-based COVID-19 neighborhood mutual aid group to explore how practices of mutual aid groups and their members further or foreclose the creation of spaces for deviant care practice.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Martin, Jasmine M.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Bunten, Devin Michelle

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/140113

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/140113